Hacker News: bigstrat2003

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Understanding is the new bottleneck"

bigstrat2003 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:15:22 +0000

Understanding has always been the bottleneck. That's why LLMs aren't actually helpful: they speed up the part which is easy (typing characters into your editor), but are neutral or even harmful on the part which is hard (understanding the problem and how best to solve it).

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Amazon will train on Twitch streamers' content by default, unless they opt out"

bigstrat2003 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:16:01 +0000

I guess I'll give them points for honesty. It's not every day that an organization openly admits that they are doing something to trick people who wouldn't otherwise willingly do that thing.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users"

bigstrat2003 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:14:08 +0000

> Hospitals surely would have been invented by secular people too, but not the crusades.

That's not true. Secular people are quite capable of murdering each other en masse for ideological reasons, and indeed have done so in the past. The crusades were caused by human nature and its evils, not by religion.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Delta"

bigstrat2003 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:57:33 +0000

I mean... the problem with that, as with all the "you have to go back and forth with the AI" scenarios, is that by the time I finish with that I may as well have just written it myself to begin with. Would take a similar amount of time, actually have my voice in it, and not cost money for tokens.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Grok 4.6"

bigstrat2003 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:21:37 +0000

Or, you know, people are sick of comment sections getting turned into political slap fights and react poorly to such.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

bigstrat2003 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:09:57 +0000

No, it very much is not.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

bigstrat2003 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:07:09 +0000

It's still insane to do that today. Using any LLM to get info for things is a terrible idea, because they will slip inaccurate info into the mix and you have no way of knowing where it is.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app"

bigstrat2003 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:09:54 +0000

Yeah, I agree. It's the inverse of the problem Scott Alexander has observed in the past: when you make an alternative platform based on the premise of "we won't ban people based on having unpopular views", you wind up with a user base of 10 principled free speech activists, and a million people with truly awful views. It turns your platform into an awful place that nobody wants to associate with, even if they agree that it's bad to ban people for having unpopular views.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Tl;dv: Over 180k meetings left wide open"

bigstrat2003 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:42:07 +0000

Ah, see, if the CEO does something that hurts the company it's ok. In fact, they will pay him (or her) for making the mistake in the form of a golden parachute. It's only the rank and file employees that actually suffer consequences from failures.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints"

bigstrat2003 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:19:15 +0000

> People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans.

Yes, because humans have intrinsic value. Even if they make mistakes, they are still one of us and deserve to be given a chance. The same can't be said for clankers.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

bigstrat2003 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:11:03 +0000

I wouldn't say it's better, but it's certainly on par with Google in their best years. And it's light years better than what Google is now, or using an LLM.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)"

bigstrat2003 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:37:47 +0000

> The bar I like to use is pretty simple: do you know who represents you in Congress (I am American so this is my bias, but substitute your country's equivalent if there is one)? As in, your state's two Senators and your district's Representative? If not, you probably don't vote or don't pay attention when you do, and you've definitely never called your Congresspeople to complain about their votes....

I see what you're getting at, but I think you need to refine your test a bit. I don't know who my representatives are off the top of my head, and I actually have contacted them within the last 6 months! It's just not information that has stuck in my brain. Likewise, I both vote and pay attention when I vote - I do some research on candidates' policy positions and (if applicable) their track records on issues that matter to me. But if you asked me to name them, I would still be helpless without looking that info up.

I think what you're trying to get at is "does this person actually engage with representatives and pay attention when voting", but memorizing the names of your representatives is not 1:1 with that. Some people will be engaged and not have the names memorized, and others will have the names memorized but be disengaged.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Tech leaders say AI means less work – staff say they work up to 90 hours a week"

bigstrat2003 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:18:28 +0000

> Since LLMs spit out LOTS of text, a person may waste lots of valuable time simply meandering through responses, and trying to keep it all in their head.

That is called "doing your job correctly". If you aren't actually understanding what the LLM puts out and reviewing it, you are going to get burned sooner or later.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "AI's profits are 'being funded by investors rather than earned from customers"

bigstrat2003 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:52:11 +0000

Yes, a ton of companies don't have a valid business model. That doesn't make it a good idea for OpenAI either.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "The AI Apocalypse Is Here"

bigstrat2003 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 02:38:12 +0000

That is no excuse whatsoever. It turns out that immoral actions don't become acceptable if you go "someone else would do it if I didn't". Perhaps they would, but you're still a bad person if you do the bad thing.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in ""Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers"

bigstrat2003 — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:31:49 +0000

The reason people say "writing code isn't the hard part" is because the only thing an LLM saves effort on is typing code into the computer. You still have to know what the code should do, and you still have to review the code the LLM generated to make sure it is reasonable. In other words, you still have to do the hardest parts of your job, and the LLM only saves you effort on something which was no real effort to begin with. That is why they are an ineffective tool, because they are helping you with the bits you don't actually need help with.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot"

bigstrat2003 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:05:49 +0000

Yeah, models aren't good at code any more than they are good at people. They turn it out very fast, but that isn't actually useful when the code needs to be carefully reviewed to find the land mines and questionable design decisions.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Zed DeltaDB"

bigstrat2003 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:14:54 +0000

Try Gram. It's a fork of Zed which changes a few things, one of which is that all the AI stuff is disabled by default. I was interested in it because it doesn't download language servers without asking you (unlike Zed). Ultimately I'm kind of on the fence between it and Sublime, but it's a lot better than Zed imo.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Almost no skill required to cook a steak"

bigstrat2003 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:05:44 +0000

Ramen restaurants are definitely not cheap in the US. I hear they are in Japan, though.

New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak"

bigstrat2003 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:02:42 +0000

> We built Electron because writing UIs using native desktop frameworks is tough.

No, we built Electron because there are a huge number of people who are too lazy to learn anything outside of HTML/etc for creating a UI. It's not actually hard to make a UI using the native desktop frameworks.